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Jericho and I exchange a glance.Finalwords?
Augustus looks around, finds Hildebrand.
“This is insanity. You must stop this.”
Hildebrand looks on, face like stone.
Girard motions to a guard who drags Augustus’s bound arms across the block. He struggles, but he’s not walking away from this.
Jericho nudges me. I follow his gaze to what is happening at the cabin and the movement at the main house. The soldiers I noticed moments ago are hurrying out, many loading into vans.
Girard picks the ax up by its long handle. Tensions are high.
“No! You can’t do this to me!” Augustus screams.
Girard bends down. “You stole everything from me. Now I will steal everything from you,” he spits the words.
I’m sure every heart is pounding as Girard raises the ax with his one arm. His face is a mixture of fire and ice, his rage palpable. Augustus stares up at the man or the ax, I’m not sure which, and I don’t know which of them screams louder as Girard brings the ax down severing the right hand of the Councilor.
For a moment, all goes silent. Eerily so. Then Ines rises to her feet and begins to clap as if it’s the end of a great opera.
Augustus is whimpering, cradling the bloody stump of his arm, his hand lying uselessly on the block, a ring on one finger glinting in the spotlight.
The cameras shut off.
Car engine’s start.
An explosion comes from the direction of the main house and Jericho, and I leap to our feet. Windows blow out and smoke begins to pour from the structure.
But Girard isn’t done yet. He tugs the ax out of the block and nods to a soldier who knew what was coming. We all knew, didn’t we?
The soldier grips a handful of Augustus’s hair and pulls him forward.
Augustus stares up, bewildered momentarily, before he understands. Before his throat is set in the groove on the opposite end of the block from where he kneels, the back of his neck bared to the ax.
“For the heinous nature of your sins, your betrayals, I, Antoine Girard, condemn you, Lucius Augustus, to death!”
Hildebrand is on his feet, mouth agape and we all watch as Girard raises that ax once more and this time, when he brings it down, there is an earth-shattering thud as it slices through flesh and tissue and bone and lodges itself in the wood of the block. In the midst of all this commotion, I hear athunk.It’s the dropping of the severed head on the wooden dais, the undignified rolling of it off the platform.
It comes to a stop a foot away and I stare at it. At the open eyes. The bloody neck.
A second explosion comes, and I look up to watch the main house become fully engulfed by flames. Girard lets go of the ax, strips off his executioner’s robe and takes Ines’s hand. The two of them walk away. They’re not running even though all around them soldiers move quickly. A smaller explosion comes from the guest house just as he and Ines disappear from view.
“Blue!” I run toward the house, into it. Smoke fills the now empty great room, the television replaying the scene, the watch count rising exponentially as I cover my mouth and nose and run down the hall where they took Blue. “Blue!” I call louder over the roaring sound of fire. I cough, grab handfuls of the robe and press it to my nose and mouth as I try the first door which opens but the room is empty. Same with the second. Another explosion somewhere behind me propels me forward and sends me crashing into the final door.
“Help. Zeke. I’m here. Help,” I hear the muffled sound between hacking coughs.
“Stand back!”
I throw my full weight against the door, but it doesn’t budge. I do it again and again, and when it begins to give, I stand back and kick it in. The door splinters. I force it the rest of the way and rush into the bedroom, finding Blue on her hands and knees on the floor.
“Blue!” I get to her, drop to my knees before her and take her face in my hands. Her eyes are bloodshot. Smoke makes it impossible to breathe. “We need to get out of here!”
I pull her to her feet but another explosion sounds, this one from the hallway outside her door. The heat is intense. I rush to the window dragging Blue with me.
“Locked,” Blue manages.
I set her down, look around for something to break it, pick up a brass lamp and tug it out of the outlet. I smash it against the glass again and again until it finally shatters and turn my shoulder into it to break out the glass.
